Anastasia Coope

Anastasia Coope's music emanates from a precipice beyond the material world. It’s exacting & enveloping, yet unmoored in space and time: ghostly, spectral, far-out folk. Her debut album 'Darning Woman' sounds like a dispatch from another past.

Making this record was a largely insular experience for Coope: She began recording music while staying at a relative’s vacant home in Beacon, NY, experimenting with recording software in an empty living room, singing directly into the open space. Until that point she had only thought of herself as a visual artist, not a musician— but it felt right immediately. Throughout the next year, she worked to invent and immerse herself in the lush, sweeping universe the record contains.

Coope’s songwriting revolves around intuition and aesthetics, rather than lyrical storytelling. The word “woman” appears repeatedly throughout the album’s song titles, but for Coope, that was an unconscious motif. “The word ‘woman’ was having a physical idea of what my songs were trying to represent through this idea of a muse or an idol or an icon,” she says. “It was a mixture of a maternal sensibility with the idea of a character, a star.”

Like Coope’s paintings, drawings, and mixed artworks, her songwriting yields an esoteric distance. It’s the feeling of the work pushing back on you, holding you at arm's length. It invites you to see, to feel, rather than know. Yet, for all that’s arcane here, Darning Woman is rooted deeply in the things we can touch.